The best website is not necessarily the best looking website. There
are several factors to consider for a well designed and fully optimized
website. If your client shows you a website that glitters and shimmers
but doesn't meet what the client wants, it is not a good website at all.
Yes,
it is easy to agree with your client and work on his design
specification. But as a professional web developer, it is your
obligation to make sure the client understand everything. Because there
is a possibility that your client will lose any number of customers
because what he thinks of his design specification might not work well
for some reasons. It means you must be willing to diplomatically tell
your client that his wrong with his ideas.
Generally, a good
business website should appear quickly on a screen. It should be
consistently very easy for beginners as well as experienced users to
navigate. Importantly, the website should be attractive when viewed with
any of the major browsers and should look better in any screen sizes
(responsiveness). Users should be able to quickly find what they’re
looking for on the site.
Essentials of Building Websites
Fast Load
There
are many design techniques to cut a page downloading time. Use HTML
text as much as possible in designing a website. More often, designers
will just slice an image from a PSD to save time working on style
sheets. Use image sprites for background and graphic icons. In fact,
there are CSS frameworks today that use glyphicons which are lighter
than image icons. As much as possible, do not use nested table. Use divs
and classes in your HTML instead.
If you’re using CMS like
wordpress, compressing and reducing graphic files is easy without
destroying the graphics quality. You can use various plug-ins like
EWWW Image Optimizer and
WP Smush.it
by wpmudev. Also, it is important to minify and compress your HTML,
CSS, and JavaScript. And place all your JavaScript links as much as
possible in the footer area. This way, it will load first your HTML
elements before the browsers make any JavaScript action.
Moreover,
it is also important to avoid rendering blocking JavaScript and CSS on
your website internal pages. An example of this is a welcome pop-up or
modal window when a new user visits a home page. To check your website’s
loading speed and performance, you can use
pingdom.com or
google pagespeed insights. They are free to use and reliably provide you a detailed evaluation of your site fixes to optimize the loading speed.
Easy Navigation
Many
internet users got lost in navigating a website. Problems in viewing a
website are not fault of the inexperienced user but rather the web
designer who designed the user interface (UI). This is true; a badly
designed navigation layout could lead the visitor to jump off to another
website. To prevent this from happening, you need to make sure that
your navigation tools are easy and user-friendly.
You’ve probably
seen many websites that uses a consistent navigation bar on the left
side of every page on the site. This is done so visitor can better
understand how to navigate through the site. If you go to
smashingmagazine.com and
wpmudev.com, you’ll see that the same navigation bar is consistent throughout the website.
No
matter how complex the website is, you should be able to organize the
topics and subtopics to make navigation easy. If you’re building
websites for eCommerce and your main navigation is in the header area,
you need to have a mega menu where visitor can easily navigate
throughout hundreds of product categories and sub-categories. If you go
to
zalora.com.hk and
lazada.com.ph you will see how easy it is to navigate using their drop-down mega menu.
Cross-Platform Compatibility
As
a web designer, making your website’s elements to be consistent on all
browsers is one of the major complex workaround to deal with. More often
web designers tend to look for browser issues after the website’s 90%
completion. I tell you; the more you do this process the more likely you
will get fired by your boss.
I suggest checking your website
elements from all browsers while doing HTML markups and CSS coding can
save you time and effort. This is way better than fixing it later in the
development. This will help you identify minor issues during the
process and help you speed up the development.
Also, a well
designed website can able to adapt various sizes of screen device such
as mobile, tablet, and wide-screen monitors. Especially today that more
and more people are using smart phones where they can browse the
internet easily and fun.
Content Readability
To
give your site an impact to your visitors, design your website’s pages
that are easy to skim in finding pertinent information. A good website
pages should have a Title, Heading, introduction, and well formatted
body content.
If you are using CMS like Joomla or WordPress,
formatting your content is a breeze. Using the latest text and visual
(WYSIWYG) editor you can format your content the way you want. This CMS
feature can make your website pages content easy to update and allowing
you to add relevant images. Also, don't mess up your content by placing
too much banner ads within the content area.
In conclusion:
A
technically stunning website that ignores many really important things
will end up as a website that doesn’t work. Use coding standards and
best practices to make sure your website is fully working and optimized
for your client. By doing this, you simply make everything easy for
your visitors. And of course, for your clients to make a passive income
and high return of investment (ROI).
